It’s depressing: Our summer scholarship project(s) may still be incomplete, the deadlines seeming to be rebukes rather than reasonable timetables. Or if we have finished, the end product is somehow not quite as spectacular as we had envisioned in June.

The other event that’s just around the corner is the submission deadline for the 15th Annual CUNY IT conference which will be held December 1st and 2nd, 2016. Have something you did on the Commons you want to share? Did you integrate a technology in the classroom that you’d like to discuss? This year’s theme is “Good Moves in Hard Times,” and the submission deadline is September 15th—you can submit online here.

One of the gems I discovered this week was Maria Hernandez’s blog Spanish Through Culture, she has integrated her coursework into her blog in some remarkable ways. From the “About the blog” page:

Exploring Spanish Cultures in New York City, is a Civic Engagement assignment designed to address this issue. The students will be conducting an interview with or report on a Hispanic organization, business, community, or individual to learn about the subject’s cultural identity, experience, and stories. The reports, with the subjects’ consent, will be shared with the public on the blog to bring awareness of Hispanic and Latino communities in New York City, which make up 27.5% of the population. This assignment considers storytelling as a practice that bridges cultural and civic engagement, and your participation is essential for it.

This blog is part of a broader way of re-thinking language learning curriculum in professor Hernandez’s classes at Kingsborough Community College, and it is very, very cool! Her recent post on the blog points to what this might look like by providing a link to multilingual pop music by Prince Royce:

Speaking of politics and unions, the Murphy Institute blog continues to be one of the most active sites on the Commons. The institute is a partnership between the City University of New York and New York City’s labor unions “designed to serve the higher education needs of working adults and traditional-aged students in their pursuit of advancement within the framework of labor, urban, social, economic, and political issues.” The folks there regularly share reports, jobs, resources, and more on their blog—it’s well worth a follow. Yesterday alone they posted four job opportunities.

And that’s just some of what’s out there. The CUNY Academic Commons could share a slogan with the famed spaghetti sauce Prego: “It’s in there!”